It sounds like a sick joke, but for Russian villagers in the remote town of Masha Vorontsova in the far-northern Komi region, it’s a reality. What two women thought was a large person in a fur coat was actually a bear, not a visiting mourner, and the bear wasn’t there to shed tears. The bear was there to turn the cemetery into a snack bar, thanks to Russia’s uncharacteristically warm summer. Bears have been digging up graves and eating corpses, according to Russian officials.
“You have to remember that bears are natural scavengers. In the US and Canada you can’t leave any food in tents in national parks,” said Masha Vorontsova, of WWF Russia. Two years ago, another group of Russian bears learned to pry open coffins to get at the tasty human meat inside. “In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others. They are pretty quick learners.”
Not only are the bears smart, they’re also opportunistic. There are plenty of salmon and wild berries, but that requires more effort on the part of the bears when compared to raiding a cemetery or breaking into garbage cans. One young man in Komi’s capital city of Syktyvkar was mauled by bears while taking out the trash. The biggest threat to the bears isn’t hunger, but hunters, as large male bears are prized by Russian trophy hunters.
Tags: unusual animals, hungry animals, unusual events, bears eating corpses, bears eating bodies, bears eating people in cemetery, Vezhnya Tchova, Komi, Russia, Masha Vorontsova, WWF Russia, bears robbing graves, bears eating people in graveyards
